In recent years, telephony and messaging applications have spread into numerous settings including peer-to-peer computer-based telephony and messaging services. One feature of some systems relates to determining the availability or presence of a user to receive and/or engage in a communication. In order to determine and communicate this presence information, a user's terminal will repeatedly transmit his or her availability to a presence server, which then redirects that status to each and every contact of the user. Similarly, each of the user's contacts is constantly and repeatedly transmitting its presence information back to the user and each of their respective contacts. The resultant traffic of presence information grows geometrically with each additional user and contact, thereby consuming vast network and server resources while providing very little useful information at the margin. Additionally, including such functionality can require considerable engineering resources and some cases a physical presence of a server on site to support the presence functionality. Thus, there is a need in the telephony field to create a new and useful system and method for determining and communicating presence information. This invention provides such a new and useful system and method.